Jim Creech took his place on the cold concrete floor among the miserable Russians. He couldn't help but bump them, they were so close. His space, outlined in yellow paint, was only 2 feet by 6 feet. He had it because its previous occupant had died.

The Germans closed the building's big metal door and locked it. Jim tried to sleep, using the pan upside down as a pillow. It was winter, and the room was unheated. Without mattresses or blankets, Jim and the 100 Russians shivered on the freezing floor.

Jim's feet hurt. They were frostbitten. The night before he was captured, he had taken off his socks and washed them. That morning his unit had to leave in such a hurry, he put on his shoes without his socks because they were still wet.

Now he was afraid to take his shoes off because he might not be able to put them back on. And he didn't want to see his feet.

As he lay hungry and shaking, he felt something crawling under his arm. He touched the spot and looked at his hand. Lice moved across his fingernails.

The next morning when the German guards removed the chain from the locks and opened the door, frigid air rushed in. Jim welcomed it as relief from the foul odors in the room, but at the same time he couldn't stand the cold.

A Russian who had been leaning against a wall the day Jim arrived was still there and hadn't moved. He had died. A few other Russians scrambled to strip off all his clothes and put them on over their own. They carried the corpse out the door and dumped it into a trench latrine.

Jim shuddered: If I die, that's what will happen to me.

The room was so bitterly cold at night that Jim kicked his throbbing, frostbitten feet against each other to keep the circulation going. His ankles swelled and hurt from the abuse.

Lying on the floor, surrounded by sickly men, he tried to think of his mother and the rest of his family in North Carolina and of his sweetheart, Joyce Soprano, in Allentown. But he was so hungry and hurting, he couldn't focus on them.

The strongest instinct is to live. Jim was close to giving up.

My mother doesn't know where I am, he despaired. If I die here and they dump me in that latrine, I'll be "missing in action" and no one will ever know what happened to me. Only God knows I'm here.

He felt the copy of the New Testament in his pocket and wondered if God had forsaken him.

I can't take this, he thought. I can't. I can't.

The morning after his third night, Jim stood outside in back of the opened metal door where it was pulled back against the building. It was enough to keep the wind off him and still give him some warmth from the sun. That was how he had spent the daylight hours.

But on this day, anger and desperation welled in him. He couldn't spend another night shut up in that putrid room with the diseased and dying. All he'd had to eat was a pint of watery turnip soup a day -- the prisoners' ration. He had to do something, and do it now, or he would soon lose all hope and perish.

He walked to the guard at the gate and said, "I want to see the commandant."

The guard said something in German that Jim didn't understand.

"I want to see the commandant!" Jim demanded.

On the verge of tears, he yelled over and over, louder and louder: "I WANT TO SEE THE COMMANDANT!"

The guard tried to shove Jim back.

But the commandant happened to be walking the grounds on the other side of the fence. Hearing the commotion, he approached the gate with his prisoner-valet, a finely dressed Russian of aristocratic bearing who knew a half-dozen languages, including English.

The commandant questioned the guard, then spoke to the Russian, who asked Jim, "What is the problem?"

Jim looked the commandant in the eyes and reached deep inside himself for the courage to speak his mind.

"I am an American. I am not a Russian. When we capture German prisoners, we don't treat them like you're treating me. We treat them with respect and feed them. I've got lice, I'm filthy, I'm hungry and I'm cold. I've captured Germans, and I know this for a fact: This is not the way we treat German prisoners.

"I demand to be treated better than this!"

The Russian translated for the startled commandant, who ordered the guard to unlock the gate. Jim walked out warily. Though he was leaving the muddy compound and metal lockup behind, he didn't know what fate awaited him as a result of his outburst.

"Follow us," the Russian said, and he and the commandant led Jim away.

In his first budget address to lawmakers, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf laid out an ambitious $33.8 billion spending plan that raises taxes a combined 16 percent while slashing corporate and property taxes, restores cuts to education and wipes out the state's deficit.